Visual Pinball 9 (VP9) fullscreen window ends up covering score/DMD window which should always be on top

Questions about Wine on Linux
Locked
sopho
Newbie
Newbie
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Dec 27, 2019 11:12 am

Visual Pinball 9 (VP9) fullscreen window ends up covering score/DMD window which should always be on top

Post by sopho »

I would like to get Visual Pinbal 8 and 9 (VP) working perfectly using wine.

The TL;DR is that the DMD/score window, which should always be on top, always ends up underneath the fullscreen VP table window. This happens both when using my window manager (XFCE) and when setting "Emulate Virtual Desktop". I would prefer to use "Emulate Virtual Desktop" all the time but any solution/suggestion/workaround would be really appreciated. The below describes the problem in excruciating detail.

When playing in fullscreen mode, Visual Pinball 8 and 9 (VP8 and VP9) have a problem where the VPinMAME window that shows the DMD (Dot Matrix Display) is hidden behind the fullscreen window of the Visual Pinball table (VP table) window itself. The VPinMAME window shows the score, the number of balls and other game pertinent information so it's crucial that it's visible during gameplay. I should first explain that several of the VP recreations actually use the real ROM from the original pinball table. The ROM itself is run using VPinMAME and connects/integrates "seamlessly" with the table model constructed in visual pinball. This is really awesome if you think about it but it does have a side effect that casues the problem I'm trying to solve. So again what's supposed to happen is that the VPinMAME window is supposed to always be on top even in fullscreen window mode but when running under wine, this doesn't happen. I run the XFCE desktop and I can see that the the VPinMAME window is marked as "Always On Top" but it seems that the fullscreen VP table window always goes on top when selected. This happens even though the VP table window is not marked as "Always On Top"..

Now the problem exists with wine version 3.0, 3.6, 4.1 and 4.6. Somewhere between 4.6 and 4.21 the situation improved where by default the fullscreen Visual Pinball table does cover everything on the screen including the vPinMame window but alt-tab-ing the VPinMame window to the front and clicking on the VP table window allows me to direct the focus on the VP table but still keep the vPinMame window in front. 5.0 rc1 behaves the same as 4.21. The problem with this is that the XFCE desktop panel also covers the bottom of the VP table window which is annoying. BTW if I _don't_ use fullscreen windowed mode, so a regular window, I get the regular window behaviour, so the VPinMame window is always on top of all other windows and the VP table window behaves as a normal window however that is less desirable.

"Did you try Emulate Virtual Desktop?" I hear you ask. Well yes, I did and I had high hopes for this. When I enable "Emulate Virtual Desktop" the VP table window is always on the front and always covers the VPinMAME window inside the wine desktop window. At that point I can't alt-tab the vPinMame window to the front as alt-tab is used by my linux window manager (XFCE) and just brings other windows to the front.

In an ideal world I would always like to be able to "Emulate Virtual Desktop" and have VP8 and VP9 work correctly like that.

Note that VPX (VP 10) has the VPinMAME window display within the VP table window so this problem doesn't exist there. VPX does have a different problem that I won't discuss in this question.

If you would like to reproduce the problem or have an interest in running some classic pinball virtual recreations you would have to:

1) Create an account on vpforums.org (Sorry about that)
2) Download VPX6setup.zip (This contains VPinMAME, VP8, VP9 and VPX)
3) Download a VP9 table and a rom for it (Say Medieval-Madness_VP91x_2.4.3.vpt and mm_109c.zip)
4) Create wine prefix for this (Windows XP and Windows 7 is fine)
5) install wsh57 using winetricks
6) Install VP
7) Install VPinMAME (run setup.exe in the VPinMAME directory. It's also included in the VPX6setup.zip file)
8) Copy the table you downloaded in the Tables directory
9) Copy the rom for the table in the ./drive_c/Visual Pinball/VPinMAME/roms
10) Run VPinball995.exe, load the table and hit F5 to "play it"
Locked